We Love Dufy! at the Kamakura Otani Memorial Art Museum

The Kamakura Otani Memorial Art Museum (KOMAM) will hold an exhibition, Dufy Daisuki! (We Love Dufy!) in Kamakura, Japan, from July 6 to September 4, 2004. From its world-renowned Dufy collection, more than thirty works of this artist will be exhibited.

Together with the painting, the Louis XIV style console table, which Dufy had in his atelier of Perpignan, will be also shown to the public for the first time in Japan, from July 6 to July 24, 2004.

Mr Yoneichi Otani (1916-1995), former chairman of the Hotel New Otani, started his private Dufy collection from purchasing La console jaune (The Yellow Console) in 1979, in which the console at Dufy's atelier appears as an important motif. Since then, this work has significant meaning to not only him but also his family and his supporters who established the KOMAM in 1997.

Anniversary of Raoul Dufy's Death

Raoul Dufy died in Forcalquier on March 23, 1953. To commemorate his anniversary, I put a movie file which I recorded at the cemetry of Cimiez in Nice, France, last year.

Visit Dufy's grave.（3.27MB／MPEG）

This movie file was deleted on March 24 (French local time).

Jean Moulin and Art

To celebrate the 60th anniversary year of Jean Moulin (1899-1943), a leader of French Resistance during the World War II, his art collection is on exhibit at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Quimper until March, 2004.

Moulin was an art lover as well as a statesman. Among his art collection of his contemporaries, there was a watercolor, La Pergola by Raoul Dufy.

Dufy in Steuben Crystal

According to the UPI article on December 16, 2003, by Frederick M. Winship, a Steuben crystal depicting Dufy's work is exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York until April, 2004. It is one of the series called "Twenty-seven Artists in Crystal".

I've seen a couple of gemmails based on Dufy's paintings before. How does it look in crystal?

Art Deco Witnesses

Today's New Sunday Art Museum, which is a weekly TV program of NHK, showed the former residence of Prince and Princess Asaka, renowned for its Art Deco style building. It is used as Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum today.

As a decorator, Dufy participated in the Exposition Internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes, that is, Art Deco Exhibition in Paris, 1925. The program didn't mention him in this context at all, though. According to Dora Perez-Tibi, Dufy created textile decorations for Paul Poiret's boats and ceramic works in collaboration with Josep Llorens-Artigas, for example. [Perez-Tibi, 1989]

Prince and Princess Asaka visited the exhibition. Probably there were more Japanese who witnessed this historic event. Did any of them happen to see Dufy's works there?

Closing for Renovation

When can we see the Fairy again?

According to the official website, Musée des Arts Modernes de la Ville de Paris (City Museum of Modern Art, Paris) has been closed since October, 2003, for renovation of the building. It will take a yearlong.

This museum is famous for a Dufy's mural, La fée électricité (The Electricity Fairy) in 1937, which measures 600 square meters. The painting, however, has been closed to public in order to remove asbestos found on the back of 250 wood panels in 2001.

A Tote Bag

I've purchased a tote bag at the online museum shop of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. It is black and made of cotton. As a piece of merchandise for the exhibition, Artists' Books in the Modern Era, 1870-2000, an owl from the woodcut for Apollinaire's Le Bestiaire ou Cortège d'Orphée is on it.

My Vie en Rose

The Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) exhibits My Vie en Rose by Nicole Cohen, a video artist, until February 8, 2004.

A publicity image shows the double images of a woman in the room and Dufy's painting, 30 ans, ou la vie en rose by using two layers of video.

Roughly translated, My Vie En Rose refers to "the good life," the condition of seeing the world through rose-colored glasses. Cohen draws parallels between Dufy's (1877-1953) trademark representations of the lightness, humor, and sheer enjoyment of life and the overabundant desire for pleasure and fantasy that she has encountered since settling in southern California.
[Source: Press Release by WCMA, July 17, 2003]

Several still images of her video installations on the Web, such as Dance Lesson and Spy Games, associated me of a series of female nudes in interior of Dufy, as they have similar compositions in common. I'd like to enjoy them in moving images.

Dans la jungle de Raoul Dufy

Dans la jungle de Raoul Dufy (ISBN: 2-85056-704-3) by Marion Bardavid is a picture book written in French based on La jungle, one of the textile works of Dufy in 1919. It is recommendable for a Dufy fan to the core.